I am an American by choice. It’s possible that this fact allows me to keep my eyes wider open to this country’s race history than is possible for Americans by birth. I am quite sure none of my ancestors owned slaves; I am sure none stopped a person of any race from eating lunch at the public counter. I am not affirming this, just speculating forcefully. This does not protect me from the collective sort of guilt that comes from supporting a polity that descends directly from the oppressor polity of yesteryear. At any rate, I am one of those Americans who believe that America never really closed the book on the two and half centuries of atrocities that was black slavery, nor on the century of injustice that was legal segregation and systematic persecution of blacks, of black males, especially.

One of my WASP friends says that 500,000 white men’s deaths in the Civil War was a sufficient price to pay for the ill-treatment of the past. I don’t think it fixed the problems left behind by this ill-treatment. As a conservative, I believe that good things and bad things happen through the family. It seems self-evident to me: When people are not allowed to form normal families, bad behavior gets transmitted through the generations until something virtuous intervenes to break the chain. For one hundred, two hundred years, you ask? Why, yes.

Yes, I am talking about reparations. Why not? The unspoken notion that coming to this land of opportunity in chains vs elbowing one’s way aboard an immigrant ship amounts to a small difference is stupid and morally bankrupt. The people who want to lead peaceful and productive lives in this country will not have the moral high ground until these monstrous historical injustices are righted, once, for good. In the meantime police officers and other officials don’t know whether they should act according to what their reason tells them or in some other, ill-defined away.

All this to talk about the protests, the riots, and the lootings in Ferguson Missouri where a police officer shot an unarmed young black man to death ten days ago.

This is one situation where rationality, judgment is needed. First things first. Many police agencies in the country seem to be operating under fudgy guidelines about using firearms on citizens. That’s intolerable. Police violence and, possibly, even more so, the pervasive threat of police violence are not trivial matters. The fear of those we hire to protect us undermines severely the pursuit of happiness, one of he foundations of our society. In a period when crime by criminals has been decreasing steadily in our society at large, there is zero excuse for criminal behavior by our police, Even tolerance for accidental shootings is too broad.

Uniform law enforcement dogma in this country should be strictly that officers do not discharge their weapons except to protect lives, their own included. The threat should be unambiguous. Yes. officers would die. I know that this sounds callous but it’s their job to risk death in the street, like soldiers. It’s not a bad job overall. I doubt there would be trouble recruiting for it under narrower strictures for firing on civilians. Law enforcement officers should know every time they fire on someone that they are probably losing their job. Life against job; it’s not a bad bargain.

By the way, my father who was a Paris cop told me something I never forgot when I was 14 and he was reading law in preparation for a promotion exam. He said that cops who don’t have the option of using force become better cops, that they find alternative ways to win confrontations with the bad guys.
(He passed the exam; thank you for asking.)

Is it likely that police officers throughout this country are more likely -other things being equal – to shoot at a black suspect than at a black suspect? I would guess so. The second day of protest in Ferguson turned into looting. A young black man dies, others get a mountain bike, their sisters get platform shoes. (I watched looting scenes on MSNBC; all the looters shown were black.) The victim of this particular shooting was a hoodlum, a large hoodlum. (The same video that shows that he did not rob a shop minutes before he was killed shows him manhandling the diminutive shopkeeper.) The weekend following the Ferguson shooting seven young black men were shot to death in Chicago. They were shot by other young black men of course, as is almost always the case. Police officers operate under the impression that African-Americans are more likely to be criminal – and, by extension, more dangerous than whites. Go figure!

Digression: A month ago, I spotted four young black men on my street trying to hot wire an old classic American car. The car was in some disrepair. The young men wore full ghetto outfit. It’s a rare thing in white-and-brown Santa Cruz. Here, one only sees pale imitation of ghetto dress on downtown whiggers on skateboards. UC students who are black wear normal semi-hippie outfits, like everyone else. I called the police. It turns out, it was their car that would not start the natural way. Did I jump the gun, (so to speak)? Did I profile racially? What would you have done? And, incidentally, I would not know how to hot wire a car. Do you?

As completely expected, the national media, almost universally liberal, is camping in Ferguson day and night. They are clinging to an exhausted, obsolete narrative of injustice for which they have no substitute. The liberals’ lack of liberal imagination is striking. They are helped by the usual racial and misery pimps and extortionists from outside the town. The old civil rights aristocracy is humming along, terrified that one in their own midst will start speaking aloud about black social dysfunctions. The television commentator Juan Williams, a black man, does it all the time but he is not part of this aristocracy; he is a marginal figure; he can be ignored, so far. The total amount of intellectual cowardice in the coverage of the Ferguson shooting is overwhelming. It’s overwhelming on issues of race in today’s America in general.

Yes, young black men often act as if they felt disenfranchised. They are, I think. Black spokespersons have been railing for thirty years or more about police not looking like the “community” they police. In general, I think the idea that black cops are more likely than white cops to defuse problems involving African-Americans seems reasonable. It does although the veteran black state police officer put in charge of keeping order in Ferguson after a few days did a piss-poor job of it. The liberal press pointed out that Ferguson Missouri population is 2/3 black. It makes me wonder why the town’s black population did not use its large majority to vote out the white municipality and to create an all-black (or nearly all-black ) police force a long time ago. No one, not one, in the media has wanted to raise that simple, self-evident question. We are still not talking clearly in this nation when racial matters are involved.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About Jacques Delacroix

I write short stories, current events comments, and sociopolitical essays, mostly in English, some in French. There are other people with the same first name and same last name on the Internet. I am the one who put up on Amazon in 2014: "I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography" and also: "Les pumas de grande-banlieue." To my knowledge, I am the only Jacques Delacroix with American and English scholarly publications. In a previous life, I was a teacher and a scholar in Organizational Theory and in the Sociology of Economic Development. (Go ahead, Google me!) I live in the People’s Green Socialist Republic of Santa Cruz, California.

23 Responses to The Shooting of One More Young Black Man: What’s Wrong With Us?

Someone on NPR claimed that blacks in Fergusen are largely unable to turn out for voting due to economic struggles….or working too much/too hard.
I don’t buy it, but only because I’ve worked gritty jobs with Mexicans who, despite second jobs and many kids (some with many women), were almost unanimously several folds more excited on voting days than I.
Anyway, it was said. Thought I’d mention it.

People who are too busy to vote should be ruled by the minority that is not too busy. That simple. I wonder where you hear that kind of crap, McHenry, I really wonder where you hear that kind of crap. I envy you your sources! PS The unemployed have plenty of time to vote.

I am a liberal/progressive but think the idea that requiring ID to vote is “just to hard” is ridiculous. Of it’s harder for the poor logistically to procure an ID, but it can’t be all that hard! I want to scream: just do it! Stop using the victim card and just get the damn ID!

crissiegirl: I think the fabricated ID crisis is just one facet of a thriving race industry. In the meantime, the alleged beneficiaries, young black people still have whopping unemployment rates, after thirty years of civil rights activity: Low economic growth (liberal policies), poor educational systems especially in black areas (liberal policies), atrocious social discipline among blacks (liberal social policies for thirty years, dishonesty of the black liberal Establishment, lack of nerve by everyone else.) Look up Thomas Sowell if you don’t know him already. He is a conservative sociologist, a black person. Reading him will hit you like a breath of fresh air.

Jacques, Americans did not have two and a half centuries of slavery. The first century there was little or no slavery in North America. For the next 60 years the people in North America were English not American, and the vast majority did not own slaves. Most of the English in North America abhorred slavery, but were prevented from abolishing it by the English King. After the Revolution, we struggled with the slavery issue and the Constitution abolished importation of slaves in 1808. The English began abolishing slavery in 1807 by banning the trade, and soon had to board French slavers to prevent English slavers using the French flag. When the English fully abolished the slave trade about 1833(?), they began using their naval and commercial power to abolish slavery world wide. The Civil War ended up abolishing slavery in the US. Of course some slavery persisted into the 1900’s, and even up to the present day!

This ‘whitey owes’ mentality is holding blacks back. About slavery: 1. blacks invented slavery in Africa 2. blacks captured other blacks and sold them to slavers on the west coast of Africa, 3. more blacks were sent to Latin America than ever were sent to the US 4. we are not down on Brazil etc for their slavery history, but somehow only whites in north America have become uniquely guilty and have a duty to atone somehow, even after all this time 5. No living white person in the US ever owned any slaves, same goes for their parents and grandparents…. 6. Only about 4-5 % of white Americans ever owned any slaves way back then 7. Jews, and not white Europeans, held a prominent role in the slaves trade, but Jews are not subjected to the same guilt racketeering that whites are ( Jews financed out of London and Amsterdam banks umpteen slave ships, Jews owned the ships and the auction blocks in the US, many of the slave ship captians were Jewish, and Jews were underrepresented in the abolition movement, plus their is evidence they owned slaves at a higher percentage than whites 8…ending slavery was a white moral crusade- whites ended it, despite the fierce and militant objections of black African chiefs and Turkish slavers…..( The Ottoman empire was in many ways just a slave trade enterprise. yet I dont hear anyone talking about any ‘Turk’ guilt’ lol)

Blacks here in America dont want to go back to Africa, their home. Thus they are thankful for the past slavery experience in a strange way

Reparations is a bad idea also due to the never ending aspect of it- where would it ever end? Would the descendents of the Portuguese empire have to pay up ? Or how about the Comanche Indians- they were quite brutal to other Indians so I think they need to cough up some dough too

We already pay reparations anyway-, its called Affirmative Action, other grants where only minorities need apply, plus blacks here have a freedom that white dont- blacks get to express racist notions left and right without much repercussions, they are ‘free’ where whites are enslaved.

Greg and Dave: First, let me correct myself; Two hundred years of black slavery in American might be a better count. Let’s shave off fifty years. There were only two hundred year of atrocities. The extent of the practice of slavery in the world and throughout history is not in dispute. Yes, including at French hands. You should see my book cover. It shows a long dyke in Saint-Malo still called today “Le Quai des Noirs” where slaves were disembarked. This is obviously a shameless digression intended to spark an interest in my recent book: “I Used to Be French….” – See below. I have no doubt that American slavery was a small part of the whole.

The point of the moral revulsion against American slavery and its aftermath (speaking as a conservative ) I thought would be obvious. This country is uniquely founded on principles of personal liberty. So, slavery and any form of state-enforced discrimination by race is uniquely repugnant here. I don’t expect much repugnance toward state-enforced discrimination in Ottoman Turkey, a state explicitly not founded on personal liberty, for example. The burden of collective responsibility is not heavier in America because American slavery was worse than slavery elsewhere. It’s worse because America is better.

By the way, if 1/2 % only own slaves and we allow it explicitly and use law enforcement mechanisms to support it, there is collective responsibility, I believe. It’s a judgment call. Make your own.

Of course, any view of reparations brings up impracticalities. I think that’s because it has never been discussed seriously in this country except by leftist radicals and black nationalists. Affirmative action (and racial quotas, and the poisonous doctrine of disparate consequences) show us how not to go. They violate the doctrine of equal treatment and they are by nature endless. Plus, they encourage blackmail.(Think “Reverend” Jackson.) Here is an alternative, off the top of my head: Offer super salaries (+100%-plus) to teachers willing to operate in areas that are 60% black. Use the salary inducement to be extremely selective in choosing such teachers. Do it for a pre-stated number of years, many years, perhaps, fifty. Let anyone who want to attend the targeted school. Continue the preferential treatment irrespective of the race/color of the student enrollment in mid-course.

Dave: You description of the Jewishness of the slave trade is baroque. Of course, there must have been Jews involved, same as in tool imports. The fact that you assign Jews almost exclusive responsibility while also describing them as not “white European” demonstrates just another attempt at scapegoating. (And, the Jews poisoned the wells that cause the plague. My mistake, that was in the Middle ages!)

Greg: Your statement that the colonists were English, not American seems to imply that the American slate started clean around 1776. It almost did but it did not. If it had started clean, slavery would have been abolished right then. The proposition was actually discussed. It lost. The American children explicitly accepted that poisoned inheritance from their English fathers. Accept the Declaration of Independence, accept the moral burden of slavery. When someone gives you a nice old house, don’t pretend the rats in it are not yours.

Please, send me $17 so I can buy fishing bait. Please, add $1.60 for taxes and $4 to help support the US Post Office. Total: $22.60

I will be glad to deliver myself around Santa Cruz , California, free of postal charge. (Two copies minimum, please, unless you are house-bound or exhausted by love.)

The book is also at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, California

The print copy is also available through Amazon for $17-plus. Just search for: Jacques Delacroix within Amazon. Make sure it’s on or click “All departments.” Here you go!
Here is the impossibly complicated hyperlink just in case. You should not need it.

This is cheap for much entertainment and even a little bit of enlightenment. The book contains many items of esoteric high-brow trivia you will be able to use to make yourself sound brilliant and humiliate your pretentious rivals at cocktail parties (Marin County) and at barbecues (elsewhere).

Jacques,
Apparently you believe in collective guilt, guilt by association. I do not. I believe that responsibility only applies to the actions of an individual and the things that he can realistically change. Also you apparently do not consider improvement as commendable.

My ancestors struggled to understand and then implement a new leap forward in Liberty when forced to address the backward tendency of the King and Parliament with respect to the rights of colonial Englishmen. They paid a great price in blood and treasure. None were blind that slavery must end, most abhorred slavery including those trapped in its processes. Many of the new State constitutions in 1776 abolished slavery, as some had already tried as colonies.

The victory and subsequent struggles to establish a working confederacy of the States consistent with our declared values took some time. The work of abolishing slavery had to proceed by law. It was messy, as free politics always are, and an ugly compromise was established. The Civil War interrupted these processes and the victorious North unilaterally abolished slavery. About the same time, the English were busy abolishing slavery world-wide, so the Civil War as a means to end slavery was unnecessary, as they soon would have forced the slave States (they bought all their cotton).

But apparently we are still guilty for the short existence of slavery in North America because we did not instantly abolish slavery after 10,000 years of unquestioned practice, despite having established a new standard of freedom and paid dearly in blood and treasure.

“the short existence of slavery in North America” The UK abolished slavery in 1833, France in 1848 ( for the second time, obviously its was not decisive the first time around). Even deeply authoritarian Russia abolished the related form of unfreedom, serfdom in 1861, beating the US abolition by four years. 1833 to 1865 is not a short time. It’s more than a generation of people being sold (including the owners’ own children), split from their families, tortured with very little legal restraint in most states, murdered at will in a few places.

The issue is not one of “guilt” as you write. It’s’ something more commonsensical: When you break something, you are supposed to fix it, or: when one breaks something one is supposed to fix it. You leaned this in kindergarten.

I don’t know if you argue that nothing was broken of that you did not break it. Those are different statements. I am forced to repeat myself here: Slavery was one long series of atrocities. Many regular Americans have hidden the issue from their minds. Conservative block the relevant knowledge out because they are so tired of being lectured by liberals. Well once in a blue moon, the liberal narrative is the one closest to the historical truth. Something was broken, all right. As I state in my essay, the possibility of a normal black family life was broken. Righteous behavior grows mostly in good families. Bad behavior is transmitted throughout the generations. That’s true in general. That’s true for the black minority in this country. Why wouldn’t it?

If you mean that you, personally, did not do it, I find this strange. You benefited (and your ancestors to whom you so eagerly refer benefited), and I too benefited, by living in the polity that was created on the eastern seaboard of north American at the end of the 18th century. It seems obvious to me that it’s the same polity today, existing since then with perfect continuity. It’s not hard to notice because there are relative few about which this can be said in the whole world: the UK, France, Japan, Portugal, the list is short. There is something objectionable about declaring,”The good things in my inheritance belong to me but not the bad ones.” Don’t you think so?

Back to the “short time” (duration) of slavery in the US: My subjective judgment is that it is very shameful that slavery was not abolished first in the US, the only country explicitly founded on personal liberty (the only one). Think of the implications for American moral history of the fact that the czars beat us to it.

Jacques,
The abolition of slavery after 10,000 years of universal acceptance was not a race. You do not win by coming in first by a few years. We, the North Americans, did not create slavery, so we did not “break” anything. Some of us got addicted to the drug. We needed to correct both tyranny and slavery, and both took time. The first would have been impossible if we attempted the second at the same time. Are you arguing that moral change is valid only if accomplished instantly?

The slavery we think of today is the large-scale plantation slavery that started about 1500 when the West African coast was opened to trade and Central and South American land became available. In the preceding 1,000 years, Caucasians were the preferred slave source because they were available and easy to capture. Plantation slavery was relatively rare in earlier times but it did exist in East Africa and Western India. The “atrocities” included abuse and loss of life in the Atlantic transport and working slaves to death on the plantation. These two were mostly European innovations. They ceased in North America after 1808 when importation slaves was prohibited by the Constitution and the English began interdicting slave ships. The Deep South plantation slaves might have noticed some improvement as they were now more valuable, but hell is pretty much the same at 500 degrees as at 1000. For comparison, the Muslims took as many slaves out of West Africa, but the transport death rate was about 80% as the young girls and newly castrated eunuchs died or were abandoned in the Sahara. If plantation slavery had been more benign as in prior centuries, it probably would not have been abolished until much later. It was the atrocities that convinced the English to ban the trade and eventually the practice. It took time for people to see that plantation slavery was very different than historical slavery.

Yes, the North Americans were originally English. Just as English and with all the beliefs and customs of the Anglo-Saxons on their little island. But over time something happened. The necessity of self-governance and self-reliance an ocean away gradually changed us. We first discovered self-governance because we had to. We later discovered religious tolerance, although originally we established little theocracies. We struggled to reform our English homeland right up to the Revolution. But 10-15 years before, we began to wake up to the fact that we were now different. Read the books, pamphlets, and newspapers of those years as we struggled to redefine just governance, shaking off centuries of accepted dogma. Everyone knew that slavery had to go, but independence had to come first for practical reasons and because the King of that time forbade abolition.

Perhaps we should move on to show how we let the Federal government create racism by their abuse of the South during “Reconstruction”. Or how a century of Democrat controlled Jim Crow, and blocking Civil Rights legislation held down black families, which were then destroyed by poorly designed welfare laws. But wait! I think we face the same decision now as we did at the Revolution, we need to save ourselves from the growing tyranny before we can solve the problems created by that tyranny. This is something we can do, something we can take responsibility for, this is something we must do.

regarding the voting issue/voter id…it’s bullshit. I work over 60 hrs each week, in addition to working out an hour each day and keeping my house clean, I still found time to vote between shifts. I was a few minutes late, but i told them I was voting and they were ok with it. (not to mention by law they are required to permit time for their employees to vote if there is no reasonable alternative on voting day, but knowing that would require literacy, motivation and employment to read it on the mandatory posters that employers are required to display at the place of employment.) regarding ID’s…you need one for damn near everything. if you rent, you need an id to sign the lease. same thing with financing a car. using a credit card. to drive you need a valid drivers license. renting a hotel room. opening a bank account. going on a plane. getting a copy of your own birth certificate. getting a passport. getting government benefits. getting a job. unless you work under the table for an employer and don’t use a car and live with someone else/homeless….you need/have an id. i imagine there are relatively few US citizens in those circumstances.

Greg: Your historical knowledge of slavery is admirable but you make astonishingly false statements.

“You do not win by coming in first by a few years.”

Of course, you do. That’s what races are about. Look at the Olympics. In addition, there is high symbolic value in coming in first in a race against the grossest , most grotesque form of abuse of individual freedom . It seems to me that transporting prisoners to an unknown place in chains with no hope for return and then, often working them and their children to death is a worse kind of tyranny than imposing unfair taxes on tea!

“We, the North Americans, did not create slavery, so we did not “break” anything.”

Similarly, I did not invent the gun therefore I am nor responsible for shooting my neighbor.

You seem to be arguing against someone else than I. I never said the at the US as a polity was uniquely guilty in the issue of slavery. As a matter of fact, American plantation slavery was probably less deadly than plantation slavery elsewhere. I keep arguing that American moral culpability is greater because the US is the only country based on individual freedom. The collective hypocrisy in this case is striking.

I also argue that if you broke it, you have to fix it. That’s irrespective of what the other kids in the same kindergarten have done.

Your use of language intrigues me. I am tempted to read into it: “Caucasian”?

I am not quite sure what you intended by “I am tempted to read into it: “Caucasian”?”, but if you mean am I “White”, then yes, I used to be English about 392 years ago, but also Scottish, Irish, Portuguese, German, and French. And according to some researcher, I am related the every European alive 600 years ago🙂.

Greg: The word ” Caucasian” comes from late 1900s pseudo-science. I am tempted to read into it that you give credibility to pseudo-science. (You asked. I replied). Basically, you have no ancestry that you know of from the Caucasus, right?

Well, since you asked. Yes, in the context I used it “Caucasian” was a bit sloppy. I intended it as a substitute for “White”, which is its current general usage and itself ill-defined. It may have been used in pseudo-science, but it was originally used with a quite specific meaning in early scientific studies. That the word and related ideas have been discarded is just the normal progress of scientific ideas, not a necessary indication of “psuedo-science”.

I could have tried to use “European”, but many people assume that term means Western European, which would have left out most of the slave sources. The very word “slave” comes from Slav, who were a primary source of slaves before West Africa. And amusingly, but not in defense of my poor usage, Muslims preferred Circassian and Georgian women from the Caucasus as harem slaves.

As for my ancestry from the Caucasus, the current theory of human evolution says that Africans migrated to the East along the southern shores of the Middle East to Asia, and then returned as the ice melted to Europe. Although the proposed maps that I have seen do not give enough detail, it is plausible that all Western Europeans are descended from those that once lived in the Caucuses. Are we having fun yet?

Greg: I reacted to the word “Caucasian” for the reasons you give yourself. The right word is “white” because it does not imply any more than it says. “Caucasian” implies a scientific determination of origin that is not justified. ” White” is whoever seems white to you and me. We would probably agree in most cases, not because of any shared scientific definition but because the usage is so anchored in our common culture. For that reason, if you saw large numbers of North Africans, you would say that they are “white.” This is important because it puts an end the canard that “Africans” – implying “blacks” enslaved large number of Europeans in their day.

In general, I am convinced that “race” is always a social construct anchored in superficial but easy to recognize physical characteristics.

I don’t know about whites returning to Europe from Asia when the climate became too cold. I thought that generally brown-skinned people from Africa became white in the Middle East and in Europe, in particular as a result of the advantage clear skin confers with respect to vitamin D deficiency. My understanding may be out of date. I am always eager to learn (from respectable published sources).

I am rather offended by the term “white.” I am struck by the disregard the term implies regarding the rich cultural impact that persons who lack significant amounts of skin pigmentation have contributed to society. Also it is disingenuous to group together those that have many dot sized pigmented spots (more commonly referred to as “freckles”) and those that don’t possess even such splotchy pigmentation. Perhaps a more accurate term for those considered “white” would be “an individual who lacks the requisite melatonin content to adequately protect oneself from the nearest source of sustained fusion reaction who descended from persons who originated on the Eurasian continental structure.”. It does have a certain ring to it…

P.S. I need to get my tongue surgically removed from my cheek. If you know any good surgeons, let me know. 😉